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About Omaha daily bee. (Omaha [Neb.]) 187?-1922 | View Entire Issue (April 25, 1915)
The Omaha Sunday Bee Magazine Pag OH t to A M 3 t - . .t, :: . fK '.;':'.' '., ' . . v . (. ... . - --.., ". . 1 1 1 1 1 t ill 1 11 1 I IT " 111 mi... iii..u...,i 1 iji. . "". ' ..... - - -mull, mi -...mi 11 frin-ii TliiUlJttlMf f arct Edward in One of th Spe cial Creeping Exercue That Gire Her Per feet PoUe and Balance. A mother raised her pretty daughter up ' . ' - .... Till she'd made her a perfect girl; .She took first prize at all the beauty shows, And sent each head away a whirl The movies took her far from mother's side, And mother took one look,-and then she cried i CHORUS. i didn't raise my girl to be Trilby I taught her to be natural, it s true, But there are times when covers are a comfort. And daughter really ought to have a few, A Venus has no business in the movies; That airy pose looks very cool to me. My girl may be a queen, But not upon a scree I didn't raise my girl to be a Trilby." rtsms such words as theit would tbs btrd who wrols that Immortal anti war -lyric. 1 Didn't Rala My Boy to Bs a Boldlsr," hare embalmed, perhaps, the dls trwalng situation of. which little Margaret Andrews, "America's Perfect Olrl." la the centre. Perfection, alai! has its perils. It ' saarea the fierce white light that beats on ' thrones and It walks the way 'perilous wherein the leaat stumble is comparable only to the worat kind of a fall for the Imperfect and those whoae peregrinations are not accompanied by the apotllght. At the same time little Mlas Margaret cannot be blamed, eren by thoee who hare the tnott decided Ideaa upon the subject, because, aa she say a, aha was taught to be natural, that nothing wholesomely natural could hare any harm, in it, and because, quite naturally, she alwsys looked upon clothes simply as thlnga to slip on or off as the caae might be. This being so. she ta only to be sympathised with when ahe auddenty discovers that there are a num ber of people in the world, not taught Just that way, who believe that K is possible to be too natural, and that there is a time and place for all things, even to the taking on and off of clothes. , Nor can" Mrs. Andrews, the devoted mother, who brought little Miss Margaret up to be perfect, be blamed. As she says, ahe waa 1!) and in a hospital when the annoying matter occurred, and while ahe thinks a great fuss la being made about Little Miss Margaret in a Back Beau tifying Exercise . nothing, still if she had not been 111 It would never, never have happened. But. why "Trilby"? Why, Trilby, it will be remembered, caused a lot of conserva tive persons much worry because she posed in what Is known as, "the altogether." And, yes little MTtis Margaret did the aame thing. ' That Is whst sit the trouble Is about, you see. Ndt only that, but there were a number of conies made of 'the allegory of which she was the most conspicuous figure, end when It got running little Mlas Mar garet walked Innocently and naturally and in the altogether in half a hundred differ ent cities every night acroas the screen, that is, of course, for it was a moving pic ture. And This Is the Perfect Girl in a Leaping Exercise That Perfecta t t t - 1 ' r : I i i " I "'.' n::c r That was much worae than poor Trilby, who alao poaed innocently, because there weren't more than half a dosen pictures of her that way, perhapa. Then when the al legory reached Loa Angeles, where the Andrews live, the first thing Mrs. Andrews saw after ahe had recovered was her daughter's picture ambling around just aa though ahe were in Eden, while half the people who looked on with her thought It waa beautiful, and the other half thought it oughtn't to be allowed. Then Loa An geles, feeling a more or less proprietary, tntereat in the Perfect Girl, took up the. matter with Just about the aame division' of sentiment. And In the meantime the Board of Censors ordered the pictures stopped end arrested the theatre proprie tors who were showing them. And It almost made Mrs. Andrews 111 again. - Little Margaret Andrews has been known to newspsper readers for a number of years. She Is not so little now Just about seventeen. From babyhood her mother trained her on a system ot her own, a system de signed to make her an absolutelj healthy and physically perfect girl woman of great intelligence, her system worked out and haa atnee been copied by schools and mothers all over the country. Little Mlaa Margaret waa a wonder at aeven, a classic model at fourteen and now glvea promUe in figure of being a Diana, an Atalanta and a Helen of Troy all in one. The system, however, did not follow the conventional lines as to the purposes of And in Another That Develops the Whole Body from Necfc to Ankles. r i n t i f 1 ' i ? s- A'-. .; sA;. Jf the Ugs and V ' ' . :lv Keeps Down ,' "r ''i'fffr . .M'i'i-S ( .... ' : j xm.-h "WhTleui ) .l .! ' This She Is ; Maintaining ' ; the Beauty ' ; Lines of f ' i Her Torso V ; " Distressing Experiences of "America's Perfect Girl" and of Her Devoted Mother Who Brought Her Up to Be Natural but Not as Innocently Natural as She Made Herself in the "Movies.'9 icy. viria KiKhU Bestrvsd. clothes. Instead It was more Grecian and certainly hygienic. More and more people in the years Miss Margaret has been grow ing up have come to have the same idea. Therefore it was that in her innocence, when Mamma Andrews was very, very ill snd the offer came to little Miss Margaret to pose in this particular allegory, that she saw no harm in it at all. She couldn't con sult with mamma because she was too sick to be bothered, but. it certainly never crossed her mind that there could have been any objection. Any thought of re fusal would have seemed ss absurd to' her as the classic admonition of the mother to her water-loving daughter must have seemed to the maiden ot whom it is writ ten: "Mother, may I go in to swim?" "Yes, my darling daughter; But hang your clothes on a hickory limb, . And don't go near the water." "Of course, the allegorical figure you will : fopresent is ah undraped," they told her. "Well, what of that?" quoth she. i "Oh, nothing, nothing," they said. And so the pictures were made. Little Miss Margaret went wandering through thousands of feet of the' allegory just aa innocently as possible. "Aren't they pretty?" she said and went back to Los Angeles. Now, ss to what happened later there are two stories. One Is that when Mrs. Andrews was getting better she heard about the affair, questioned Margaret, hadn't the heart to disturb her daughter's very natural point of view on the matter and waited anxiously for the pictures to come in range so she could see them. The other Is that she was very rudely shocked by the sight of posters that car ried to her mind familiar lines ot a figure she herself had modelled, and was consid erably more distressed when she went into the picture show and saw the whole alle gory. She was not distressed because she though there waa anything wrong about it Only, being a woman ot experience and intelligence, she foresaw the criticism which waa inevitable. However, the mis chief. If mischief there was, was done. The Los Angeles Board of Censors took exception to the allegory and caused the arrest of the proprietors ot the thea tre where the picture was being displayed. They charged them with having "photo graphed, delineated and produced the pic ture of a nuo woman," adding that the picture "shows the figure in such detail aa to offend public morality and decency." This waa even more distressing, and immediately almost every one took sides either for or agalnat little Miss Margaret's achievement. Some ot the opinions are interesting. Mrs. Russell B. Hatlett. a member of the Board of Censors, who voted against the picture, said: "So far as entertainment snd artistic value are concerned it is all right. It ls a very beautiful picture. In condemning ita exhibition here I was actuated by several motives. It arouses vulgar curiosity, as will be noted by the crowds of men and boys around the display in front ot the theatre. But again, Mrs. Clara Shortrtdge Folts, the president of the Million Club, aald: "There la nothing indecent or immoral in showing in a wholly artistic and entire ly unsuggestive manner the beautiful form of a perfect specimen of womanhood. Only those who look for indecency In art nth sn reverence for can find It, and then it is only in their own minds. The man or woman whose primal emotions are so gross, whose mentality Is so abnormal, that they can see evil in this picture are not to be taken into con sideration. As a mother, as a teacher in the public schools for years, as a worker for the uplifting of the human race, I say unreservedly that every man, woman and child should see this picture." Which certainly leaves no uncertainty as to Mrs. Foltz's feelings. This is what Mrs. Andrews herself has to say about it: "I am so sorry Margaret has had to meet with criticism and be misunderstood. "Had I not been ill, delirious and In the hospital, it would not have occurred. How ever, I am proud she is such a sweet, good child and possessed of such a true per spective of physical and artistic expres sion that the criticisms have not meant as much to her as they might to one older and having more understanding of the world." Clearly she indlcatea that it was not for a spectacle of this sort that she had raised her daughter. And as for little Miss Margaret, this it what she had to say: "Always a beautiful body a perfect phy sical condition, has seemed to be but ths expression of spirit. To be well, to be nappy, to be good that is surely what na ture meant tor children. When we bring evil thought to the expression ot nature's handiwork we are harming our own prog ress. "The idea of the allegory may perhaps have been taken from a very beautiful painting. I wonder if the model who posed for that has been criticized as I have been. "Don't you think, after all, the pity la that there are some people so evil-minded that they find erajoyment In transposing all good, all beauty, all truth Into wrong? "All my life I have been part of Nature's moods- I was so 111 when a baby my mother would keep me hours in the sunlight, un clad. As I grew older and lived far up In the mountains of our Napa ranch, my great joy waa to ride or tramp or flah. absolutely without clothing, the winds, the sun, the mists all bringing strength and peace. "Physical exercise, music and the study of art; these have always been the things I most loved. To slip from my room at the ranch and dance in the moonlight under the great trees, like one of the nymphs ot which I had read, that was beautiful. "Mother has always taught me that a perfect body must be reverenced, as the temple of Nature. Whenever I have visited art galleries, or studied great statues and pictures from reproductions, ever the hu man body has seemed to ma the beautiful expression of all that is highest and best. "So it waa when, finally I was told how I was to pose I thought it not strange; all were so kind, so considerate "It was not until I heard what people mgh"hlnt- Ppreclated what others .v800 V trtel wm deo,(18 whether the theatre proprietors were right oe wrong In disobeying the censoring board . ' vvuiiinurai met can occur to people brought up to be natural that can't occur to others reared with uuonufu ana aruflclal clothes.